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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22548418">Your Battles Inspired Me</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleObsessions/pseuds/LittleObsessions'>LittleObsessions</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Star Trek: Voyager</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Anger, Angst, F/M, Mind Control, Misery, Possession, Self-Loathing</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-02-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-04-28 15:36:15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,785</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22548418</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleObsessions/pseuds/LittleObsessions</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>"Come back to me..."</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Chakotay/Kathryn Janeway</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>39</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Your Battles Inspired Me</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>A prompt, long ago on Tumblr. I don't know who prompted it but I loved the idea and had to write it - so thank you to them. It was along the lines of 'Kathryn is being controlled by aliens, what does Chakotay say to bring her back?'</p><p>Thanks to MiaCooper for her stellar Beta skills. It's always a relief to have someone more talented than you making sure you're up to scratch.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p>
<hr/><p>
  <strong>"I love you so much that nothing can matter to me - not even you...Only my love- not your answer. Not even your indifference"</strong><br/>
<strong>— Ayn Rand</strong>
</p>
<hr/><p> </p><p> </p><p>She imagines being wrapped in her mother’s arms, feeling the absolute security of no more pain, of no more suffering.</p><p>This fantasy is worn like a child’s blanket – the red and blue one that lived at the foot of her bed in Indiana – soft and frayed and dirty and overused.</p><p>And an essential comfort.</p><p>Her mind is full of needles – thin, sharp, injurious, - and they are compelling her, and she can’t understand why and how, and how much more of herself she has to give in order to atone for her sins.</p><p>There is an imbalance in the multiverse, surely, for her to be worthy of infinite punishment.</p><p>And yet here she is.</p><p>The suffering feels endless; it swirls in her brain with a turbulence she can’t control, and she thinks she might die from the storm raging inside her mind.</p><p>But she is infinite too, she tells herself, and she can hold all the pain in the universe and still go on.</p><p>She has gone on even after she has done the unthinkable, the unspeakable. Because that is what she does and who she is.</p><p>She will be able to go on even after this. Though she cannot understand why this has to be done, why this seems like the worst of all the punishments the multiverse could mete out against her.</p><p>She just knows she has to purge her mind of him, to clean it of him and all the complications he brings out in her.</p><p>So she swings the knife up and towards him, and she knows the terror in his eyes should give her pause and for a moment it does.</p><p>Beautiful eyes, she thinks, and they make the knife loosen between her fingers. They are part of her, a small voice tells her in the back of her mind, <em>they are stitched into my memory.</em></p><p>But what is memory? She wonders, maybe aloud.</p><p>
  <em>Memory is a planet and being stranded there with a man who made you feel alive – properly – for the first time in years. And it is him rescuing you from your worst impulses, from the inspector with the serpent’s tongue and the Equinox’s captain. The man who saved – is always saving – you from the moments when you would have grown to despise yourself…even more. </em>
</p><p>But the voice is so small, and the impulse is bigger than anything, her acting on it more important even than breathing.</p><p>She has been inside her own mind before, she can recall, so lost in the maze of her own misery that she wasn’t sure she would be able to escape it. Multiple times; the vague, thick death of a loved one, the horror of being taken hostage... This time it feels quite different, as if she is within and outwith simultaneously, as if she can see and hold and feel her own madness all at once. There is nothing tethering her to her conscience, no duty or willpower to uphold. </p><p>Something has freed her. And the freedom is terrifying.</p><p>So she tightens her fingers resolutely around the hilt, and arcs it downwards.</p><p>But he is speaking, saying words she can’t understand, and while his grip is crushing and violent as he holds her back as if she is the almighty tide, his words are soft like velvet.</p><p>“Come back to me, Kathryn, come back to me.”</p><p>His words work their way into her blood, and her body responds like it’s heard them before, as if he’s prayed them over her before, in that soft, deep baritone.</p><p>They feel familiar and heavy and she wants – needs – to shake them off, to stop them pulling her away from her task. But everything about him feels strong and safe, and she wants to let him sweep her away with the unfamiliar truth he seems to be telling her with so few words and so much conviction.</p><p>“The aliens are controlling you Kathryn; they’re making you do this. You don’t want this. I know you well enough, I know you. I know you don’t want to do this.”</p><p>She watches the words shaping his mouth, watches his fingers closing around her wrist, feels his crushing grip as he encircles it.</p><p>His touch is so hot she thinks, for a fraction of a second, that her skin is burning. And the pain makes her flinch, forcing the knife forward. She watches as he closes his hand around it, stopping it just short of the centre of his chest, and blood almost instantly trickles through the tight gaps of his fingers, over his dark knuckles. He winces but not once does he break eye contact with her.</p><p>“Come back to me,” he pleads, the pain that is absent from his eyes rich and thick in his voice. And it washes over her, soft and whole, sweeping her up in it. Enveloping her in something entirely familiar and unfamiliar. Like a song from her past; she knows every note, but can’t remember the words.</p><p>She’s never been good at recalling words, important things, things that should matter. She hates herself for it.</p><p>“I love you.”</p><p>He has never said that, she can tell, and the raw openness of this pulls something apart within her, something so closed she didn’t know it existed. The knife loosens in her palm again, and the words that are trapped in her chest – the responses that feel like they’ve lived there forever – want to escape, make themselves real in the light of day.</p><p>But all she can manage, before the security team rush her, is;</p><p>“What am I doing?”</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>-0-</strong>
</p><p> </p><p>If her mother was here, she might be able to answer the question. Because it’s a question that’s been running through her mind since she awoke in sickbay. Gretchen, at least, would be able to quiet her screaming soul.</p><p>The doctor has explained the who and how; the Naieth with an impressive cortico-stimulant which allowed them to influence her, though it seemed to have done a little more than that. And the doctor can’t explain <em>why</em> she wanted to kill him. <em>He can’t explain why.</em></p><p>If she looks inside herself, just below the surface of her uniform and her skin, she could find the answer with very little looking.</p><p>She would laugh, if it wasn’t so painful to recall the realness of the surreal, the desperate urge to quiet all the voices – all the constituent parts of her loathing – that she has worked tirelessly to silence for the last six years.</p><p>She doesn’t know how long she can go on for.</p><p>For all her mind was a wildfire of torn memories and half-feelings in the moment, the moment itself keeps coming back to her with fatal clarity. It has been a week and she cannot drag herself from it.</p><p>Worst of all, she cannot look at him; not as they work together on the Bridge, not as they brief the staff, not as he casts his pleading eyes over her. </p><p>Because his words are stuck in her whirring mind, running rampant.</p><p>She keeps them to her like a poisonous secret, all the while wanting to scream her fury at him, her absolute rage in the face of his dissension.</p><p>How can he love something that is only parts, entirely incapable of being something whole? How can he use words he does not, cannot mean?</p><p>If she wasn’t so completely broken by the way he pulled her back – better than she could have herself – she could bring herself to apologise for trying to kill him. But her own arrogance, her hubris, won’t allow it.</p><p>He had no right to use those words, to unpick her like that, to try and stitch the pieces back together.</p><p>She can’t stop looking at his hand, the one he drapes over their shared console, and in spite of knowing they don’t exist, she can’t stop seeing the fine white scars where he closed his hand around the knife in spite of the pain.</p><p>He can’t stop closing his hand around the knife, even though it wounds him.</p><p>She hates metaphors.</p><p>She gives him the bridge, without looking at him, and retreats to her Ready Room, because she can hide there, and try to put all of the things that have escaped back in their boxes.</p><p>But as if she invited it, as if she knew it was coming, he finally breaks and when he requests permission to enter her Ready Room, she knows she has to look into those eyes with the lucid knowledge of all the things they hide and all the pitiful love and anger they hold for her.</p><p>And if she sees that, she may see it reflected back in her own.</p><p>She feels bile rising to her throat as he stands in front of her, feet hip-width apart.</p><p>“Permission to speak freely?”</p><p>The last time he did that, he broke her even more. She doesn’t know that she’ll survive this onslaught.</p><p>But what choice does she have, in the face of her deserving punishment?</p><p>So she nods.</p><p>“I don’t know what I did, what I have done, to deserve this contempt, but I at least deserve an acknowledgement of what happened.  I said-”</p><p>She holds up a hand, shakes her head, feels her own panic rattling through her.</p><p>But the momentum has been set in motion, and the force of it is unstoppable.</p><p>“I said what I did because of the fear in your eyes, and the pain, and it was the only thing I knew to say. It was…” he swallows, and she can see his trembling.</p><p>She can’t decide which suffering is worse, the horror of the truth or the indignity of the lie they are both living.</p><p>But the indignity is what she knows, and she can’t rescue him from this, even if she wanted to.</p><p>“It was to distract me,” she says, with an airy wave of her hand, cutting the truth down to die at their worn boots. “I get it. I would have done much the same. And it was the right thing to do.”</p><p>He nods, and she sees the rage surge up in him before he tamps it down. She does not let him speak.</p><p>“Thank you, Commander. Dismissed.”</p><p>As he goes, she pictures all the boxes closing, all the knives grasped, all the strewn pieces, and all the punishments he deserves.</p><p>And finally, her mind is quiet.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p>
  <strong>“Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.” – James Joyce</strong>
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